Solidaridad Network: Working towards sustainable commodity supply chains
Solidaridad, an international civil society organization, operates across five continents with smallholder farmers and other workers, striving for agricultural production that respects people and the planet. Solidaridad works across supply chains to build capacity and skills including at farm level.
The East & Central Africa team highlighted that perishables were always facing post-harvest losses and storage issues and that COVID-19 only aggravated the situation, putting more pressure on handling, transportation and marketplace access, which leads to food safety issues and more losses. Solidaridad is working with off-takers to connect farmers and market players, facilitating trade through this network.
The pandemic also highlighted the need for human approach in technologies: more than 80% of farmers cannot access mobile apps, either due to old phones or bad network connectivity. Solidaridad's teams call them one by one, despite the cost to push content to farmers.
In West Africa, Solidaridad is adapting existing agricultural programs' and projects' implementation to COVID-19 by ensuring business continuity, for instance helping farmers with training and capacity building activities in coca and palm oil in the region through reduced physical contact.
- Response platform
- Global
- NGO
- Agriculture, aquaculture & forestry
- Consumer Services
- Food
- Agriculture
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Solidaridad is open to new partnerships to address COVID-19 that can be established bilaterally between a company and Solidaridad. They developed several projects with clear objectives even before the pandemic outreach, and are looking at accelerating them to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. For instance, the Food For All project in Kenya is looking at increasing farmers' access to extension services and introducing climate smart farming technologies.
This project aims to improve livelihood and resilience of 48,500 households in the eastern region by increasing the land and labor productivity as a key pathway for food security. If your company's work potentially feeds into Solidaridad project objectives, and depending on which region you operate in, please contact:
- Solidaridad East and Central Africa - Rachel Wanyoike: rachel.wanyoike@solidaridadnetwork.org
- Solidaridad West Africa - Isaac Gyamfi: isaac.gyamfi@solidaridadnetwork.org
To learn more about this work, click here.